Music Trade Review

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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW.
A THINKING MACHINE.
BY GRANT ALLEN.
'HINGS marvelous there are many," says the
Attic dramatist, "but among them all
naught moves more truly marvelous than
man." And, indeed, when one begins seriously to
think it over, there is no machine in all the world
one half, nay, one-millionth part, so extraordinary in
its mode of action as the human brain. Minutely
constructed, inscrutable in all its cranks and wheels,
composed of numberless cells and batteries, all con-
nected together by microscopically tiny telegraphic
wires, and so designed (whether by superior intelli-
gence or evolutionary art) that every portion of it
answers sympathetically to some fact or energy of the
external un.veise—the human brain defiestheclumsy
analysis of our carvi- g knife anatomists, and re-
mains 10 this day a great unknown and almost un-
mapped region, the terra incognita of modern physi-
ology. If you look into one of the ordinary human
machines, with its spokes and cogs, its springs and
levers, you can see at once (at least, if you have a
spark of native mechanical intelligence within you)
how its various portions are meant to run together,
and what is the result, the actual work, to be ulti-
mately got out of it. But not the profoundest
microscopist, not the acutest phychologist, not the
most learned physiologist on earth could possibly
say, by inspecting a given little bit of the central
nervous mechanism of humanity, why the excitation
of this or that fragment of grey matter should give
rise to the picture of a brown umbrella or the emotion
of jealousy, why it should rather be connected with
the comprehension of a mathematical problem than
with the consciousness of pain or the memory of a
gray-haired, military looking gentleman, whom we
met three years ago at an hotel at Biarritz.
Merely to state these possible alternatives of the
stimulation of a portion of the brain is sufficient to
bring up vividly into view the enormous and almost
inconceivable complexity of that wonderful natural
mechanism. Imagine for a moment a machine so
delicate that it is capable of yielding us the sensation
of a strawberry-ice, the aesthetic delight of a beauti-
ful picture, the intellectual perception of the equality
of the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle, the
recollection of what we all said and did the day we
wont for that picnic to the Dolgelly waterfalls, the
vague and inconsistent dissolving views of a disturbed
dream, the pain of toothache, and the delight at
meeting once more an old friend who has returned
from India. The very mention of such a complicated
machinery, let alone the difficulty of its possession
of consciousness, is enough to make the notion thus
nakedly stated seem wild and absurd. Yet there the
machine actually is, to answer bodily for its own
possibility. You can not cavil at the accomplished
fact. It may be inconceivable, but at any rate it
exists. Logic may demolish it; ridicule may explode
it; metaphysics may explain it away; but, in spite of
them all, it continues still imperturbably to be, and
to perform the thousand and one incredible functions
which argument conclusively and triumphantly
demonstrates it can never compass. Call it material-
ism or what else you like, experimental physiology
has now calmly demonstrated the irrefragable fact
that on the brain, and on each of its parts, depends
the whole of what we are and what we feel, what we
see and what we suffer, what we believe and what we
imagine. Everything that in our inmost souls we
think of as Ua, apart from that mere external burden,
our body, is summed up in the functions and activity
of a single marvolous and inscrutable organism, our
human brain.
But, though physiology can tell us very little as yet
about how the brain does its work, it can, neverthe-
less, tell us something; and late researches have
made such a difference in our way of looking at its
mode of activity, and have so upset many current and
very crudely materialistic errors, that it may, perhaps,
be worth while brieily to state, in popular and com-
prehensible language, how the organ of thought en-
visages itself in actual working process to the most
advanced among our modern physiological psychol-
ogists.
Let us begin first with the old-fashioned and, as
we now believe, essentially mistaken view—the view
which found its fullest and most grotesque outcome
in the spurious science of so-called phrenology, but
which still lingers on, more or less carefully disguis-
ed, among the "localizations" and "specific ener-
gies" of many respectable modern authorities.
According to this superficial view, overtly expres-
sed or implicitly suggested in different cases, each
cell and ganglion and twist of the brain had a spe-
cial functian and purpose of its own to observe, and
answered to a single special element of sensation or
perception, intellect or emotion. In a certain little
round mass of brain matter, in the part of the head
devoted to language (if we push the theory to its ex-
treme conclusion), must have been localized the one
word, "dog" ; in the next little mass must have been
localized "horse"; in the next "camel," in the next
again, "elephant," and so on ad infinitum. Here, a
particular cell and fiber were intrusted with the
memory of the visible orange; there, another simi-
lar little nervous element had to do with the recol-
lection of the audible note, C flat, in the middle oc-
tave of a cottage piano. Thus reduced to its naked
terms, of course, the theory sounds almost too obvi-
ously gross and ridiculous; but something like it,
not quite so vividly realized or pushed so far into
minute detail, was held not only by the old-fashioned
phrenologists, but also by many modern and far
more physiological mental philosophers.
When we come to look the question in the face,
however, the mere number of cells and fibers in the
human brain, immense as it undoubtedly is, would
surely never suffice for the almost infinite variety of
perceptions and facts with which our memory alone
(not to mention any other mental faculty) is so abund-
antly stored. Suppose, for example, we take merely
the human beings, living or extinct, with whose names
or personalities we are more or less fully acquainted,
and try to give a cell or a fiber or a ganglion to each ;
how many cells or fibers of ganglia would be left un-
appropriated at the end of the enumeration for all
the rest of animate and inanimate nature, and all the
other facts or sensations with which we are perfectly
familiar, to say nothing of emotions, volitions, plea-
sures, pains, and all the other minor elements of our
complex being ! Let us begin, by way of experiment,
with Greek history alone, and try to distribute one
separate nerve-element apiece to Salon and Perian-
der, to Thermistocles and Aristides, to Herodotus
and Thucydides, to Zeuxis and Pheidias, to Socrates
and Plato, to iEschylus and Sophocles, to Aristides and
Alexander, and so on straight down to the very days
of the Byzantine Empire. Then let us begin afresh
over again, and give a cell all round to the noble
Komans of our happy school-days, Eomulus and Re-
mus (myth or reality matters little for our present
purpose), the seven kings and the seven decemvirs,
the Curtius who leaped into the gulf and the Scsevola
who burned his hand off in the Etruscan fire, those
terrible Scipios and those grim Gracchi, our enemy
Horace with his friend Maecenas, and so down
through all the Csesars to the Second Eomulus again,
pretty much where we originally started. Once
more, apply the same thing to English history, and
allot a single brain-element apiece to everybody we
can remember from Cerdic of Wessex to Queen Vic-
toria, from Gedmon the poet, through Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, to Tennyson, Swin-
burne, and Oscar Wilde a cell each for all the
statesmen, priests, fighters, writers, thinkers, doers,
and miscellaneous nobodies whom we can possibly
recall from the limbo of forgetfulness, from the
days when Hengist and Horsa (alas! more myths)
drove their symmetrical three keels ashore at Ebbs-
fleet, to the events recorded for our present edifica-
tion in this evening s newspaper. (And observe in
passing, that out of deference to advanced Teutonic
scholarship, I have simply flung away Caractacus and
Boadicea, Carausias and Allectus, and all the other
ague vaguely-remembered personalities of the earlier
British and Romano British history.) Why,by the time
we had got through our historic personages alone.we
should have but a very scanty remnant of places for
the thousands and thousands of living individuals
with whom each one of us must have come in con-
tact, and each of whom seems to occupy a sep-
arate niche or distinct pigeon-hole in the endless
archive of the particular memory.
And this is only a single small department of the
possibly memorable, a mere specimen category out
of an innumerable collection that might equally well
have been adduced in evidence. Take the animal
world, for example—the creatures themselves, and
not their names—and look at the diversity of cats
and dogs, goats and sheep, beetles and butterflies,
soles and schrimps, that even the ordinary unlearned
man knows and recognizes, and mostly members.
Narrow the question down to dogs alone, and still
you get the same result. Consider the St. Bernards
and the mastiffs, the pugs and the bull-dogs, the
black-and-tans and the King Charlies, the sheep-
dogs and the deer-hounds, the shivering little Italian
grayhounds and the long dachs-hounds that you buy
by the yard. Every one of these and countless others
has got to have its cell all to itself in the classiflca-
tory department of the human brain, and I suppose
another cell for its name in the portion specially
devoted to language also. Add to these the plants,
flowers, fruits, roots, and other well-known vege-
table products whose names are familiar to almost
everybody, and what a total you have got at once!
A good botanist, to take a more specific case, knows
(in addition to a stock of general knowledge about
equivalent on the average to anybody else's) the
names and natures of hundreds and thousands of
distinct plants, to say nothing about innumerable
small peculiarities of stem, and leaf, and flower,
and seed in every species and variety among them
all. No, the mere bare weight of dead fact with
which everybody's memory is stored and laden de-
fies the possibility of reckoning and pigeon-holing.
Make your separate dockets ever so tiny, reduce
them all to their smallest dimensions, and yet there
will not be room for all of them in the human brain.
The more we think on it, the more will the wonder
grow that one small head can carry all that the
merest infant knows.
And now observe once more in turn a still greater
and more fatal difficulty. I have spoken through-
out, after the manner of men, as though each
separate object, or word, or idea, had a clearly de-
fined and limited individuality, and that it could be
distinctly located and circumscribed by itself in a
single solitary isolated cell of the nervous mechanism,
But in reality the very terms I have been obliged to,
use in describing the matter have themselves con-
tained the implicit condemnation of this crude, hard,
and impossible materialistic conception. For no
idea and no word is, as a matter of fact, so rigidly
one and indivisible, like the French Republic. Take
for example once more our old friend " dog," and let
us confine our attention just now to the word alone,
not to the ideas connoted by it. Dog is not one
word : it is a whole group and set of words. There
is, first of all, the audible sound, dog, as it falls upon
our ears when spoken by another. That is to say,
there is, imprimis, dog auditory. Secondly, there is
the muscular effort, dog, as it frames itself upon our
own lips and vocal organs when we say it aloud to
another person. That is to say, there is, secundo,
dog pronounceable. Thirdly, there is the written or
printed word, dog, DOG, in capitals or minuscules,
script, or Roman, or italic, as we recognize it visibly
when seen with our eyes in book or letter. That is
to say, there is, tertio, dog legible. Now, it is quite
clear that each of these three distinct dogs is made
up of separate elements, and can not possible be re-
garded as being located in a single cell or fiber alone.
Dog auditory is made up of the audible consonantal
sound D, the audible vowel-sound au or 6 (unhappily
we have no universally recognized phonetic system),
and the other audible consonantal sound G hard ; in
that precise order of sequence and no other. Dog pro-
nounceable is made up of an effort of breath against
tongue and teeth, producing the soft dental sound D,
followed by an unimpeded vocalized breath, produc-
ing the audible vowel-sound au or 6, and closed by a
stoppage of the tongue against the roof of the mouth,
producing the soft palatal G. Finally, dog legible,
in print at least, is composed of the L separate
symbols D and 0 and G, or d and o and g, or d and o
and g. Yet all the distinct and unlike dogs would
be unhesitatingly classed by most people under the
head of language, and be located by phrenologists,
with their clumsy lumping glibness, in the imaginary
"bump" thereto assigned, or by more modern phy-
siologists (whose excellent scientific work I should
be the last to undervalue) in the particular convolu-
tion of the left hemisphere found to be diseased in
many cases of "atactic aphasia," or loss of speech.
How infinitely more complex and varied, then, is
the idea of dog, for which all these heard, spoken,
written, or printed dogs are but so many rough and
incomplete symbols ! For the idea of dog comprlsos
the head thereof, and the tail, the four legs, the eyes,
the mouth, the nose, the neck, the body, the toes,
the hair, the bark, the bite, the canine teeth that in-
flict it, and all the other known and remembered
peculiarities of perfect doghood as ideally realizable.
If we are to assign peradventure a special tract in